The first post has all the information about what was going on, why and how to resolve it... This is already fixed in the current Pi-Star 4.1.0-RC1 download, so you don't need to do this stuff, this is more of an answer to the "So what was the problem" question that is likely to be asked.

so WHY did this affect Pi-Star (since we have no VNC etc) - well we do put the AutoAP up if the WiFi doesnt connect within 2 mins, so what was happening, is the entropy generation would stall - holding up the boot process for long enough for the AutoAP timer to run down and start the local AP, and stopping WiFi from working.

Really not a fun one to figure out, but there it is, if this stops even one of you from tearing your hair out when working on your own images, especially buster based ones - then it was worth posting. I really don't know why/how mine would work and not have the same issue, but this was very touchy about what hardware would play up - different SoCs seem to behave a little different.

The first post has all the information about what was going on, why and how to resolve it... This is already fixed in the current Pi-Star 4.1.0-RC1 download, so you don't need to do this stuff, this is more of an answer to the "So what was the problem" question that is likely to be asked.

so WHY did this affect Pi-Star (since we have no VNC etc) - well we do put the AutoAP up if the WiFi doesnt connect within 2 mins, so what was happening, is the entropy generation would stall - holding up the boot process for long enough for the AutoAP timer to run down and start the local AP, and stopping WiFi from working.

Really not a fun one to figure out, but there it is, if this stops even one of you from tearing your hair out when working on your own images, especially buster based ones - then it was worth posting. I really don't know why/how mine would work and not have the same issue, but this was very touchy about what hardware would play up - different SoCs seem to behave a little different.

It's interesting that this is not just down to the upgrade to Buster, but on the same hardware (3x Pi Zero W v1.1) I have never seen this before with Stretch or with Jessie.

Just about to boot one of my Pi Zero Ws with the new re-imaged SD card so will report back if it doesn't just work!

And on the first of 3 it does just work, so in a day or two I will upgrade the other 2 to 4.1.0 and see how much everything has changed.

There are some bugs in the logrotate setup - I'll be fixing those with an upgrade to RC2 in a few days time...
This may actually turn out to be the root issue with the CPU getting hammered on the v4.x images - so thats another one that would be good to put away.

I updated from vn 4.0 RC4 to vn 4.1 RC1 and I restored my backup created by vn 4.0 RC4 and noticed that the system time zone and dashboard language were not restored. Are these items not being backed up? Other than that the new VN 4.1 RC1 works fine here on my jumbospot on a RPI 3B+ board.